Contents

Gameplay

Just like its predecessors -- NHL Hockey and NHLPA Hockey '93 -- NHL '94 was designed to give gamers the most realistic hockey experience possible. The game maintained the series' signature vertical camera angle, which offered the player distinct gameplay and strategic advantages over contemporary side-view hockey games, and kept the 2D sprite character models of NHLPA '93 (albeit with some new animations). While today such a lack of graphical change from year to year would be criticized by players, the NHLPA '93 framework was regarded as the most groundbreaking hockey engine ever made—meaning that NHL '94 had the luxury of simply tweaking the basic aspects of the game. The result was one of the most widely-acclaimed sports games ever made, and a game that still has an extensive cult following to this day, such as NHL94.com

That's not to say no improvements were made to the engine by EA between 1992 and 1993. Notably, NHL '94 introduced the "one timer", an authentic hockey move where a player shoots the puck directly off of a pass; NHL '94 's one-timer was in fact so devastating that it would become the scoring method of choice for most players. However, other techniques such as "the duper" and "the move" remain quite popular and effective scoring tactics. Because of NHL 94 's (mostly) realistic and action-packed gameplay, the game is almost universally considered the best hockey game of its generation, and is frequently mentioned in "all-time top sports game" lists.[3]

Removed features

Other versions

The game was included in the PlayStation 2 version of NHL 06. The port included was based on the Sega Genesis version, but lacked the official NHL rosters from the original title.

A version titled NHL Pro Hockey '94 was released in Japan for the Super Famicom which has all the important text in Japanese including the main menu, the actual hockey players, the secondary (end of period and post-game) menus, and the crowd meter. However the passwords still used letters of the Roman alphabet and numbers exclusively.